What the title is doing

The preface says the title points at two books at once: Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth, and Nietzsche’s will to power. Campbell, as they describe him, treats myth as a map of the unconscious and a path of personal transformation. They call their thesis a reversal. The myths that last, on their account, were designed. A priestly class put them into a people. They would rather say collective consciousness than collective unconscious, and then they advise against using that phrase.

They do not throw out the psychological reading. Saturn eating his children can still be a story about a parent who cannot stand to be replaced. What that reading misses, they say, is that Saturn and the Olympians are also eras and peoples. The story is regime change. The same move is made with Jacob and Esau: not only brothers, but two nations, and a birthright taken.

The line they want remembered is blunt. Myth foresees victory. What begins as a fable becomes a fact. Cultural power, in this telling, belongs to the initiate who does not yet hold the state.